Kyle Wagner

Haagan-Dazs should make its own app, you can just picture a coked-up branding executive typing into a sweat-soaked BlackBerry after wrestling a horse to the ground with his bare hands. And so they did, they built a Haagen-Dazs app that's really a 3D augmented reality violin concerto. It's wonderful and horrible, and it's everything.

Imagine being the ice cream boss who first got the memo about Haagen-Dazs Concerto Timer.

"Just as wine needs to breathe, Häagen-Dazs® ice cream needs to soften for a few minutes after you remove your carton from the freezer."

OK, I'm good with this.

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This way, you can taste all the rich and creamy flavor of our fresh world-class ingredients.

Sure, OK.

And that’s why we created the Häagen-Dazs Concerto Timer app.

That sounds more or less ri—hold on. Concerto?

Just open the app and point your camera at the lid of any Häagen-Dazs carton, and you will instantly experience a virtual violin concerto perfectly timed to allow your Häagen-Dazs ice cream to soften to the perfect consistency for a taste that’s truly made like no other.®

Goddammit.

As absurd as this may seem, though, it's basically all 99.99999 percent of apps are. Haagen-Dazs Concerto Timer is pretty much a perfect distillation of what makes up every dumb app.

Here's a problem no one really has, solved in a way that has nothing to do with anything, and using technology advanced enough to basically out-do literal magic spells. There is no reason for this to exist. It's extraneous in all of the worst ways technology is extraneous. It is an abomination.

And it's also kind of delightful. Your mom would probably adore your little violin-playing phone making a magical 3D person appear every time she opens a new tub of ice cream. And that's not even getting into the fact that Haagen-Dazs is also for some reason donating $5 to help save bees if you download its violin app, which makes zero linear sense but is a nice gesture (like the app itself!).

Apps make no sense. The App Store is a junk drawer. Junk drawers aren't so bad, sometimes.